Monday, April 25, 2011

Creating news content and releasing the information via Twitter has become the norm, but tracking how and where this information goes is difficult to gather in a useful manner. The New York Times R & D department has created "Cascade", a tool that allows them to follow the conversation through its various twists and turns and visualize it in various very creative ways. This is not just an exercise in creating something very cool – and it is very cool – it's an incredibly useful tool for publishers to track their content and figure out the best ways to propagate it.

Michael Zimbalist, VP of R & D at the New York Times said, “Our hypothesis has been and continues to be that those organizations that can be responsive to data in real time and make business decisions surrounding that data in real time will be the organizations that prosper in the 21st century.”

Remember back in the day -- the day being the 1960s and 70s -- when Dr.Timothy Leary was the prophet of LSD, urging us all to "Turn on, tune in, drop out" and was described as "the most dangerous man in America" by President Richard Nixon? It somehow escaped my attention that is the mid-1980's Leary was trying to cash in with his video game/computer program "Mind Mirror". The game allows you to "try on" different personalities. If you're interested in trying it there is a Facebook app that approximates the program. Watch the good doctor describe his program in this video.